[LINK] Some Friday links

[rfmcdonald]

This week, I've added the comment forum t h e FORVM to the blogroll. Go, visit!

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton blogs about the need to remember history so as to war against the dying of the light.


• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen is wondering what the investment patterns of Japanese housewives indicate about the structure of the Japanese economy and the prospects for world economic recovery.


• blogTO reports that fiddleheads are now available to eat in Toronto. real fiddleheads, not the ones that I mistakenly identified on Prince Edward Island as a youth.


• Antonia Zerbisias at Broadsides points out that Mother's Day was proposed by a woman, Julia Ward Howe, who sought to make the holiday into a memorial by mothers to their sons killed in the Civil War and other conflicts. And yes, she also wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes Niall Ferguson on the origins of the Second World War, to the effect that Hitler's foreign policy was actually a radical reorientation of Germany's traditional foreign policy.


• t h e FORVM's M Aurelius makes the point, on Margaret Thatcher's 30th anniversary, that she would come across as a "Euro wimp," a member of the Democratic Party, even, to many Republicans today. (She believed in science! She allowed abortion rights! She didn't bomb targets on the Argentine mainland!)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Charli Carpenter makes the point that the question of whether or not torture is effective is beside the point.


• Marginal Revolution explores the reasons why Canada's financial sector didn't have a meltdown on the American model. Among other things, people can't walk away from their mortgages.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness examines the horse flu epidemic of the 1870s, with its implications for the economy, politics and war, and the emergent fields of microbiology and epidemiology.


• Noel Maurer takes on the concept of a resource curse.


• Space and Culture has a picture of oil sands scrapers on the move in northern Alberta.


• Spacing Toronto's posts a video depicting the Lower Donlands, now a relatively industrial and unattractive area, post-clean up and restoration, while Thomas Wicks blogs about the Iroquoian longhouse in Toronto.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer commemorates the 1934 visit of Canadian communist leader Tim Buck to Toronto.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Sumin wonders when the United Federation of Planets became socialist. Yes, I know.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that interethnic marriages in the North Caucasus are becoming increasingly rare and wonders about this statistic's import on interethnic relations.